What happened on August 16 — On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted …

Skype's outage: Lessons learned — Skype has its official response to its nearly two-day outage: A software bug was unearthed after numerous restarts over a Microsoft patch download. — Russell Shaw has more, but here's what Skype had to say: … So what are the key learnings here (Techmeme has more):

Google reveals stake in Chinese social Web Tianya — SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) revealed on Monday that it had acquired a stake in Chinese community Web site Tianya.cn, indicating a foray by the global search leader into social networking in the world's second-largest Internet market.

Google-powered Questions & Answers for China — Wenda (wen da meaning "ask and answer" in Chinese) is a new question & answers site in China... powered by Google, in cooperation with Tianya.cn, a popular net forum in China, as Googlfied reports. It's re-using the same framework …

Black 8GB Nokia N95 hits FCC — Looks like a black version of the N95 just hit the FCC. We're really digging the black exterior, and they've added 8GB of internal memory under the hood. We also peeped a reference to Nokia's new music store (Nokia.com/music, dead in our browser and on our N95) in the user manual.

Gmail driving Google Apps adoption at college — Google's plan for world domination includes convincing colleges and universities to adopt its Google Apps Education Edition suite, and it's showing signs of success thanks to the seemingly ubiquitous appreciation of Gmail.

The end of ERP? — As the founder and leader of PeopleSoft, Dave Duffield played a seminal role in establishing enterprise resource planning, or ERP, systems as the IT engines of big business. But then, in a hostile takeover, the enterprise software giant Oracle yanked PeopleSoft out of Duffield's hands.

Wi-Fi Carnival Comes to Town — The California State Fair isn't complete without a Ferris wheel, midway, and wireless network. — Recommend this story? — The sprawling California State Fair opens in Sacramento this weekend and Bil Lowry will be watching a key part of it …

Three Strategies for Thriving on the Decentralized Web — As Long-form Content Becomes Bite-Size, Make Everything on Your Site Eembeddable — The Long Tail of content and increasing demands for our attention have created a perfect storm where traffic to brand sites may soon shrink.

Trip down memory lane: Woz the car salesman — "It... is... AWESOME". - Steve Wozniak — Long before he dreamed of dating Kathy Griffin, Steve Wozniak was bitten by the show-biz bug and agreed to appear in the 2nd best Datsun 280Z commercial ever. — For those of you wondering, below is the best Datsun 280Z commercial ever.

HandBrake 0.9.0 Released! — "But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" — We're proud to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.0. — Download it now.